To discover which cities were best suited to raising families, additional data were included, such as the percentage of the population under the age of 15 and the percentage of families with children, awarding more points to cities with lots of kids.

Also factored in were the cost and availability of child care as well as access to higher education.

Among the reasons that communities in Ontario ranked so well, according to Maclean’s, were the fact that the province “has Canada’s lowest health-care wait times, and its small towns have the least crime in the country.”